Make is primarily used with C and C++. It is not commonly used in Java, Rust, Go, NodeJS, or hardly anything besides C and C++. Make is not "generally used with other languages".
Rust https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/tests/run-make...
Go https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/runtime/Makefil...
NodeJS https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/Makefile
OCaml https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/blob/trunk/Makefile
Python https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Makefile.pre.in
Haskell https://github.com/ghc/ghc/blob/master/ghc/Makefile
R https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/Makefile.in
CLR https://github.com/mono/mono/blob/main/Makefile.am
Ruby https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/master/enc/Makefile.in
Downstream projects in these languages do not typically use Make.
More to the point, I clicked on the Go one, and it's just including this tiny "Make.dist" file that does nothing except invoke "go tool": https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/Make.dist
Wow. So useful.
I clicked on the Rust one, and not only did it seem to be specific to some old testing infrastructure, but I found this note:
> There are two kinds of run-make tests:
> The new rmake.rs version: this allows run-make tests to be written in Rust (with rmake.rs as the main test file).
> The legacy Makefile version: this is what run-make tests were written with before support for rmake.rs was introduced.
So, it's an obsolete system that is being migrated away from.
But, again, the main point is that what the toolchain does with its free time has little to do with how end user applications are developed, and the complaints in this thread were strictly about building applications in distros, not about building toolchains.
If an application in one of these languages uses make, it is typically just a little syntax sugar around the toolchain commands, which does absolutely nothing to absolve the project of the complaints Linux distro maintainers have about how dependencies are managed.
What people are claiming is that make is used as a build system for projects whose source code is written in C or C++.
Ironically many modern C/C++ projects use Cmake to generate Makefiles. If anything the inverse of your observation is mine.
Because if they're still using the language-specific build tools and dependency management systems, then I think you would find that the Fedora maintainer higher in this thread would not be any happier that there is a sugar coating of Make. That's not what they're asking for, based on other rants I've seen from Linux distro maintainers.
The more complex ones at $JOB actually do some caching, dependency management, code generation, and compilation.